Guest and sponsored opinion pieces published on The Daily Blog, offering diverse perspectives within clear editorial guidelines.
Bravo Rachel Stewart for taking on the ‘sour Old Men’. It is true that a few ‘grown-up boys’ chose to lecture her in public. That is their problem. Not that I mind being a sour old man. What I am sour about is not the end of ‘democracy’ but the general ignorance about ‘democracy’. That is not confined to any particular gender or generations, but to all those in thrall of what passes for democracy in capitalist society.
Ja Rule’s attempt at a luxury festival: Fyre Festival, in the Bahamas recently turned into total chaos as struggling locals turned on the partiers. The festival goers, who paid between 7 to 17k for a ticket to the festival, were mugged at gun point, sometimes by security guards at the festival. The inequalities of the Bahamas have reached the point where public safety is at risk. Only last year there was coverage highlighting the dangerous levels of inequality in the Bahamas and how poverty rates had increased in all age categories.
In the past few weeks, we have been in touch with a close friend who lives in Berlin, having moved there from New Zealand several years ago.
Deliberately sabotaging the rail corridor to Auckland International Airport is one of the most irresponsible acts I have witnessed during my time in local government.
April 17 was the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian Prisoners. Some 1500 detained Palestinians began a hunger strike on that day, with the aim of calling the world’s attention to Israel’s illegal system of mass arbitrary arrests and ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners.
I find it difficult to not be frustrated, disappointed and a little angry every year when ANZAC Day comes along.
It’s not just the anguish of losing tens of thousands of our best and brightest in historic conflicts or the pain of the families they left behind or the damage these wars caused our communities and wider society.
It’s the way our Government treated so many Maori when they returned from war that still makes me angry all these many years later.
We all understand the anger anyone of us would feel when a loved one is hurt by someone. You wouldn’t be a human being if you didn’t want to punish a person for doing something criminal or cruel to someone you identify with, but allowing anger and fear to dominate our thinking has created more problems than solutions within our prison system and it’s time we all acknowledged that.
Whenever simple solutions are proposed to address complex questions, alarm bells should start ringing. In the last year, the likes of Trump in the U.S. and Nigel Farage in the UK have successfully wooed electorates with populist messages that are big on rhetoric, but scant on detail.
As a co-organiser* of Waiheke Island’s Ditch Double-Decker protest and as someone involved with the petition to remove these buses from Waiheke, I believe that Mike Hoskings has completely misrepresented this issue.
It’s time that we were honest about why the Government have opened the flood gates of immigration and it’s time we were honest about how we are going to change it.